Robot Snakes Crawl Up Your Pants
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 7 of March , 2008 at 6:14 am
What’s better than robots with six legs? Robots with no legs. Especially the ones that not only like to get frisky with humans, but that can also be found crawling around all of those horror movie type places (OMG they’re coming in through the vents! Everybody panic!!!). It’s not just fun and games and terror, though, there’s some fancy hardware and software going on too:
This work considers two issues: snake robot locomotion and modular robot design. We achieve snake robot locomotion by designing gaits, which are cyclic internal motions that allow the mechanism to interact with the environment to propel itself forward. Our gaits enable snake robots to maneuver through a variety three-dimensional terrains and include swimming and climbing. The robots, themselves, are a modular chain of single degree of freedom units each powered by a low-cost, yet modified, hobby servo that we call the Super Servo. We have updated the internal electronics in the servo as well as created new mechanism designs so as to optimize efficiency and robustness.
I especially like the rolling motion, since as far as I know, that’s something that living snakes don’t do… Or at least, my snake did not appreciate me trying to get her to emulate it.
[ Modular Snake Bots ] VIA [ Make ]
Category: Research
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